Cigar Smoke (review)

Esther Lamneck is a clarinetist teaching at New York University, where she is director of the NYU New Music and Dance Ensemble, as well as Director of Woodwind Studies and of the Graduate Music Program in Italy. She has been described by the New York Times as “an astonishing virtuoso.” In her own words, Dr. Lamneck is “dedicated to expanding the boundaries of music to create new art forms which include performance movement and instrumental theatre” (steinhardt.nyu.edu/music/auditions/new_music_and_dance). She has an impressive catalogue of discs of mixed electroacoustic music, featuring both clarinet and the Hungarian tárogató.

Cigar Smoke is a collection of works for clarinet and electronics, all of which were written for Ms. Lamneck. It could be said to represent a snapshot of current trends in academic composing, since all the composers are university professors, at the University at Buffalo, New York University, University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, and State University of New York, Oneonta. All the works are technically demanding in the extreme, requiring multiphonics, extreme altissimo playing, and many other advanced techniques, from finger slaps to growls. Collectively, they exploit every sound possibility of the instrument, and pay tribute to Ms. Lamneck’s mastery of it. It would be easy, then, to simply assess the disc as an interesting set of new pieces, but that would ignore one of its most interesting and complex aspects, which is the performer’s role as co-creator of these works.

In all except one of them (the exception being Crack Hammer, by Zack Browning), samples of Ms. Lamneck’s playing are used to create the computer score, thus her own performance style informs the works from conception. She is an accomplished improviser, and because many of the works require some degree of interactivity between clarinetist and computer, we hear her improvising and interacting with the computer scores, and with her own pre-recorded and processed playing. For instance, in Robert Rowe’s work Cigar Smoke, the computer sounds consist of “processed clarinet material and synthesized gestures generated during the performance,” so the performer both initiates sounds through the computer, and reacts to them through live improvisation. Mr. Rowe has written on the aesthetics of interactive music systems, and the new parameters they afford to composer and performer. He has pointed out that by using an interactive system, the composer must make highly specific musical decisions in designing the computer programming, while necessarily ceding some creative control to the performer as she interacts with the computer. Ten years ago, in 1999, he wrote:

The resulting music represents a new kind of composition at the same time that it necessitates new kinds of performance skill. The human player working with an interactive computer system can learn how to perform with it much as she would learn to play with another human. The very real differences between computer and human performers mean, however, that the human has a new degree of freedom in invoking and directing real-time algorithms through different styles of performance. An interactive composition changes and matures as the human and computer performances increasingly intertwine (“The Aesthetics of Interactive Computer Systems.” Contemporary Music Review 18:3, p. 85).

Since those words were written, uncounted numbers of works have been written for interactive systems and live acoustic performers, so the field has matured in many ways, but these aesthetic issues are still being addressed. What that means for this reviewer is that one cannot critique this disc using the traditional differentiation between the merits of the composition and the merits of the performance, because that distinction is necessarily blurred in interactive compositions. Ms. Lamneck’s ability to play the role of virtuoso performer and also to be playful through improvisation is obviously central to the composers featured on this disc. As Lawrence Fritts says in his...